Dear Mavis,
Tonight the cold, stone porch beneath my feet reminded me that winter is unforgiving. The death of it keeps clinging to the spring I'm living in. I drive by the local dives of East Nashville. Beneath the twinkle lights of cedar porches I see couples bundled with their heads thrown back in laughter. I wonder if they really have warmth inside them or if their lives are just another fantasy I have made up in my head.
Mavis,
I am not cool enough.
Mavis,
I feel too much.
When I was in middle school I thought it was the worst. That terrible beak-nosed Hannah girl would always drink cold water because it "burned more calories." I should have never listened to her. When I did, I started starving myself and put my body to sleep.
My body has never woken up.
Mavis, I have been wandered through by people more lost than found.
I am a terminal full of passerbys seeking only their destination [and never seeking me].
I house iron chairs that are always full and always empty.
When people freshen up I pretend it's for me--not for the woman at their next connection that they will leave their wife for [if only for an instant], not for the long ride in the taxi cab home with foreigners who are rude and smell like salami sandwiches, not for the porch light that is still on for them at midnight at the end of the street...
for me.
Mavis, no one left the light on--
And the house was cold too.
I keep writing about the same things.
I pray for new hooks but they don't come.
I've let go of everything,
Even coffee.
This new sadness is strange. It doesn't come with words.
I miss the sorrow I could haul on my shoulders like a toxic marriage--
At least I could write out of it.
It was fertile and consistent.
You know when you buy a new shirt and you wash it--and then it doesn't "feel" right ever again? That is what our friendship was like. It was romantic and beautiful and I wanted him. And then I didn't. And then I did. And then it hurt. And then...it was just numb. I wanted him to be my everything. But I couldn't make it fit.
I do not believe in leaving.
I wish all things were meant to be.
The trouble is: I have learned most things are not meant to be. The things we think are the best are usually the worst. We flutter toward self-destruction like moths to flames and rarely do we stop to consider the consequences.
I remember when I considered the consequences.
Mavis,
I'm not that stupid.
I just believed in love again. I believed, and I took a chance and it didn't work. I didn't work.
It was my fault.
It always comes back to me
And the long winding walk home.
I stumble onto my cold stone porch fiddling with my keys, praying to God maybe the mail will come tomorrow and in it will be a letter from him telling me he loves me...
That he still loves me.
But, I guess that's wishing just a little too tenaciously.
Mavis,
Sometimes I feel like I'm a window
with all the glass broken out of my frames.
What does that mean?
Stockard
